This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Laravel Spark. This is the first post in the series. As Pulse Storm (the small boutique software consultancy I started and continue to operate) takes a half step back from ecommerce and shifts back into software systems consulting, I’ve found myself doing a lot of initial application [...]

Last time we finished up our look at Laravel 4.2's autoloader implementation. Like a lot of features in Laravel, (or any framework), once you pull out the microscope sharp edges begin to jut out everywhere.

Last time we said we'd be wrapping up our series on the Laravel 4.2 autoloader. Apparently we were fibbing, because I just realized we've failed to cover a key concept in Laravel autoloading, and one that would be impossible to shoe horn into

This one's a quick article to transition us from Composer back into Laravel. Also, in a rare bit of timely news, the Laravel core team just released Laravel 5.0. This release features some really big new features (a task runner!), promotion of

Today we're going to veer slightly away from Laravel, and take a look at Composer's autoloading features. While Composer bills itself as a "Dependency Manager", its real strength is that it gives PHP developers a standard environment to build their applications in.

PHP, the language, leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to sharing and organizing your code in a project. This problem goes back to PHP's roots, and the choice not to include a python or ruby like module system. Over the years

So far in this series we've stayed pretty focused on core Laravel concepts and their underlying implementation. However, this week we're going to go slightly farther afield and discuss some of the static method meta-programming used by Laravel's "Eloquent" ORM.

It's another quick primer this time. Today we're going to talk about a PHP 5.4+ feature called traits. While Laravel doesn't make heavy use of traits they are sprinkled around the core codebase, so you'll want to get familiar with them.

Last time we described the PHP patterns used to implement Laravel's facade feature, and started to describe some of the "gotchas" involved. We briefly discussed how a facade introduces a second type of singleton/shared service into the system, as well as the inherent problem

Laravel is already a well documented system. The quick-start guide guide has all the information a developer needs to start building applications with Laravel. What's less well documented, and more interesting to me, is documentation of Laravel's implementation. The PHP community has a pretty